


Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind

by kototyph



Category: Humans Are Space Orcs (Meme)
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, For Science!, Gen, Humans as Eldritch Monstrosities, Intergalactic University Systems, McGuffins and Unobtainium Galore, interspecies shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:48:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28132707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kototyph/pseuds/kototyph
Summary: In the end, she is forced to contact one of the undergraduate intern-larvae for assistance, who must have been lurking in wait for just such a summons.  He appears in minutes with antennae waving nervously, a headset and text-production screen in his hands.“It says... it is the human Steve,” the larva relays, symbols marching across the screen as the headset tracks the human’s eye movements on a lettered keypad. “Oh, wait, that’s a male pronoun.Heis the human Steve. He wants to know what has happened to the, um, his ship.”
Comments: 47
Kudos: 233
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FandomisOhana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FandomisOhana/gifts).



## 1.

The first time Kurukk ever meets a human, it’s in the aftermath of a catastrophic core failure on an old planetary settler ship.

The _Dawnbreaker_ has been interrupted by a negative mass leek while trundling between systems on its way to a particularly far-flung colony. The _Rukkatar,_ a university research vessel, is the only ship within parsecs of its coordinates and gets there just in time to execute emergency evasive maneuvers as both the old trawler’s massive warp engines get blown off in their entirety. They scrape one interstellar transmitter set off the _Rukkatar’s_ forward hull and sail aimlessly away into space, to finish explosively decomposing somewhere in the unmapped regions. Hopefully not too close to anything sentient.

She later overhears in the corridor outside med bay that this was the human’s plan, which the gossipers agrees makes sense: warp engines are not supposed to be ejectable, after all, and doing so was probably wildly dangerous and required feats of strength and self-sacrifice heretofore unknown in confederated space. The human had _emotionally attached_ itself to the settlers, or cargo, or the ship itself, they speculate, and so had _accomplished the impossible_.

“Do you have nothing better to do with your time?” she demands in rapid clicks, rounding the corner to confront the clustered _Rukkatar_ crew. “No tasks? No duties? Leave my sight at once!”

“Yes, revered doctor!” they chitter back with appropriate amounts of fright, and scuttle away.

The human— the singular human on the _Dawnbreaker’s_ manifest, transferred to the _Rukkatar_ for their access to superior equipment and to the university’s human care instructions— is currently lying in her infirmary across several standard-size beds, missing an amount of dermal tissue that would have been immediately fatal in most species. As she reenters the room, she realizes that it is also somehow still horrifyingly conscious, and its two globular eyes are following her movements. 

“Greetings. You are safe,” she clicks and shapes with juts of her legs and wings. “I am a medical professional.” 

The human briefly extends a thin membrane over its eyes. 

“I am a _medical professional._ Do you understand me?” she asks, more impatiently, and when it only membranes at her again she gives up and goes in search of a translator headset. Ideally one updated more recently than the first expansionist age.

While she searches, a low, irritating buzz of growing intensity begins to emanate from that side of the bay, and it takes a moment for Kurukk to connect it to the human and not a stray hose or loose panel inside the air circulation system. As she understands it— and she has resisted understanding much— direct human-to-human communication involves blasting vibrations at some ridiculously lethargic wavelength via wet skin flaps, something that not only sounds disgusting but reportedly can run at decibels able to rupture important organs in more delicate member-species of the confederation. 

She fixes the human in the bed with a glare and rattles her carapace. “None of that! I will find a translator and then we will speak— until then, be _quiet.”_

The vibrations cease, and the human’s eyes are at a wider aperture than before. Kurukk clicks in satisfaction, and returns to the cabinets and drawers.

In the end, she is forced to contact one of the undergraduate intern-larvae for assistance, who must have been lurking in wait for just such a summons. He appears in minutes with antennae waving nervously, a headset and text-production screen in his hands.

“It says... it is the human Steve,” the larva relays, symbols marching across the screen as the headset tracks the human’s eye movements on a lettered keypad. “Oh, wait, that’s a male pronoun. _He_ is the human Steve. He wants to know what has happened to the, um, his ship.”

“He knows exactly what happened to the ship, he was there,” Kurukk snaps. “Tell him I need to know if he has any nonstandard sensitivities to the following painkillers: g’urkkun nukkara—”

The larva’s skill with the translation software is incredibly underwhelming, but after thirty minutes of her existence she’ll never get back the Human Steve— the human-steve? Is it a title or subspecies?— has confirmed his only allergy is to a compound she’s never heard of and does not exist in her stores. Twenty seconds later she has him roundly unconscious. 

“You are free to go,” she tells the larva when he tries to linger in the doorway. 

“But maybe… if he wakes up—” 

“Depart!” she clacks rapidly, and the larva almost snaps a tarsus as he skitters out into the corridor.

Human Steve does awaken at some point during third shift, and vibrates demandingly until she locates the translator and brandishes it in his general direction. 

“Ship?” the screen translates, slowly. “People safe? Safe people safe ship?”

“For quark’s sake, _yes,”_ she rattles, tugging it away so she can type. “Safe people safe ship _confirmed,_ you potentially brain-damaged moron.”

The human stares intently at the screen until it renders her response, and then bares its facial bone extrusions at her. It takes a moment to recall a recent diversity seminar disseminated to faculty via datalink, running in the background while she did actual work: this rather stomach-turning display indicates happiness.

“Good good good,” reads the screen after a moment. “Happy safe. Thanks many.”

“My stipend is not large enough for this,” Kurukk says, headache hammering away between her ocelli. “Goodnight. Please stay as still and quiet as possible.”

By her return at first shift, the human has completely destroyed and reconfigured the translator to recognize his vibrations as words, and Kurukk learns against her will that Human Steve has never met an ukkur before, and is very glad to meet her and her students (she will find the larvae who snuck in here after hours and dissolve their keratin in acid). He has twenty-four Earth years, though some of that has been spent in stasis. He’d been going to the faraway colony as a general laborer because he’d read interesting things about the local fauna, but he’d changed his mind halfway there. He is almost-glad (she does not understand this emotion) the core had malfunctioned on the settler ship and brought him here, even if it nearly killed him. 

“Here university ship yes?” Human Steve vibrates and the translator relays. “Research? Planet research?”

“The university deploys this ship for numerous research purposes, yes,” she grumbles. So _noisy._ If there were literally any other space large enough to shove him and his life-saving equipment not immediately adjacent to her office, she’d pick him up and carry him there herself.

“University students on ship? Hiring students work ship?”

“... yes?” she says more cautiously, distrusting the reappearance of Human Steve’s mouth bones.

“Good to have information,” the translator says, as Human Steve’s eye membranes shutter and open very deliberately. “Sorry talk much. Question you? I answer.”

“Or you could go back to sleep and _be quiet_ ,” she suggests. Her head is a solid ache from mandible to thorax.

“No no, interesting please to continue talk. Please?”

_“Ugh.”_

Kurukk learns that unlike other dwellers of the M-class planet Earth, humans cannot actually regrow their own limbs or replace mouth bones indefinitely. Which means she needs to recalibrate some treatment options.

“Just the once?” she asks with great skepticism, eyeing Human Steve’s exposed mouth bones. 

“Once, yes,” the translator affirms. “Just baby bones.”

But Human Steve claims that humans can, in fact, secrete hormones that allow them to run vast distances or lift hundreds of pounds above their standard, but only in times of great personal strife.

“Sounds like a lie,” she says.

“Not lie,” the translator says. “Truth. Can do, have seen.”

“Sounds like a big, stupid, cilia-fusing lie,” Kurukk says, and decides then and there that humankind’s reputation among the confederated planets is one part exaggeration and the other total fabrication for the purpose of overawing their enemies. She resolves to never again entertain another embellishment.

* * *

Human Steve applies and is accepted to the university, on the strength of his varied but excellent educational background and with Kurukk as one of his references. He does not tell her he’s listed her as a reference, and she only finds out when the dean of admissions vidcalls to congratulate her on snagging a human for their xenobiology program. The application essay was simply incredible, he says— inspirational, heartfelt, a glowing review of their work and ship. The _Rukkatar_ now has student representation from all twenty-three confederated systems, and the university main campus is sending a press team. It will be good publicity. And she should really stop calling the students larvae.

Human Steve shows up in the _Rukkatar_ manifest as an official student two cycles later, never having left his sickbed, and Kurukk feels a grudging respect for— if nothing else— the pure and unadulterated gall of humans.

## 2.

The second human she meets is also gravely injured, and is the second student accepted by the university: Human Steve’s close companion from a previous colony stay, Human Kostya. Human Kostya is when she realizes that she must make another exception— every salacious stereotype about human emotional attachments is both real and deserved, and this human epitomizes all of them.

“He tried to— um—” one of the other larva is explaining. Looming behind her is Larva-Human Steve, also wearing an intern’s smock, eyes wide and signing quickly. Kurukk ignores him; he’s picking up Basic signage very well for a new speaker, but is not yet coherent in medical terminology.

“I can guess, thank you,” she says, peeling the sheet away from Human Kostya’s… rather damaged dermis. And exterior gonads. “Did this man attempt intercourse with a rock face?”

“Um. Yes? This planet is home to many sentient quartz formations, and the geology department requested—”

“I did not ask for a full debrief,” Kurukk says dourly, accepting a pair of tweezers from another larva. Human Kostya shifts against the bed, and his eye membranes flutter.

 _“Kkurukk,”_ Human Steve says in passable ukkur click-tongue, loud as an energy cannon discharge, and when Kurukk jerks her head up he’s frantically signing, “Protection ears must protection must must—” 

Beneath her instruments, Human Kostya takes a shuddering breath and opens his eyes.

“Sorry very,” Human Steve signs, after they’ve all fled the room and the incredible _noise_ generated by what Human Steve assures them is only a startled, not actively malicious, human confronted by unexpected visages. “Sorry, most important doctor. Sorry sorry. Kostya sorry too.”

“My title is _revered,_ you waste of recycled oxygen! I am _healing this human_ and then I am _jettisoning both of you into space,”_ she chitters at a yell and barely hears herself, antennae clamped tightly to her head and thorax.

* * *

Human Kostya is indeed sorry. But, when questioned about his research methods into the lives and livelihoods of the quartz formations, he only shrugs and signs, “Xe offered. Myself do anything once, for science.”

## 3.

The third human is the worst, because the relatively tiny Human Natalie takes the illogical maxim of _“For science!”_ and applies it to fields of study impossible to simply warp away from. She has proven to be a brilliant practical engineer; this month, her chosen studies concentrate in robotics.

“Kurukk! Collect your humans!” the most venerable Professor Hahal howls in color, furious reds and oranges streaking across his gaseous surface as he blurs towards her. He’s careening down the corridor fast enough to leave a multicolored vapor trail behind, three bots of various designs in hot pursuit. The pompous windball deserves every ounce of human mayhem he attracts, and she’s honestly delighted it’s happening, but there does appear to be some kind of edged weapon attached to the lead bot and she hates sitting on incident review boards.

“Human Natalie is _your_ student!” she rattles from the far end, holding the door but not above slamming the airlock in his face if he doesn’t reach her before the bots do. “Tell her to stop them!”

Human Natalie has also joined the chase, while attempting to sign reassuring things like “All okay! Bots only wanting to analyze you! All okay, no running, only analyze!” But her mouth bones are exposed and she has that bright, wide-eyed and utterly _human_ look Kurukk has come to associate with massive explosions, misappropriated research specimens of dubious safety but “enormous emotional significance,” and the ingestion of any substance high in sucrose and not immediately poisonous.

“I do not wish to be analyzed!” Hahal flashes in rapid pink-grey-yellow, closing on Kurukk’s position. “Tell them I—!”

The lead bot, whose flat, round chassis suggests an original function in the maintenance tubes, suddenly sprouts a small plasma jet and _leaps_ into the air, catching Hahal in the effluvial hindquarters. Hahal bellows in white as they stampede through the open lock, and Human Steve, crowded in behind Kurukk, uses an instrument tray to bash the lead bot backwards into the corridor and shoves the door closed. 

Outside, Human Natalie gives an ear-ringing yelp of distress, and Hahal is immediately pressed to the viewport.

“Natalie! Natalie, are you—? Oh, I don’t believe this! She’s cradling that thing like a— like an _infant_. After it tried to kill me!”

“Stabbing bot is favorite,” Human Steve signs, brow ridges wrinkling. “Hope okay.”

Hahal billows to twice his usual size in affront. “Pardon me? You hope the _robot_ is well?”

“Stabbing bot?” Kurukk asks him, with a finely honed sense of human-adjacent dread.

* * *

Human Natalie, who has the best signing diction of the three humans, explains that the robot’s name is Stabby, though she confirms stabbing is not its primary function. Human Kostya had gotten _very tired_ one night (which even Hahal recognizes as code) and taped a small scalpel to Human Natalie’s project chassis. And it stayed.

When pressed by the incident review board as to the reason the scalpel remains, despite the obvious dangers of arming a cleaning bot, Human Natalie communicates with all apparent earnestness that the bot resisted its removal and appears to simply enjoy being sharp.

## 4.

After that, they start showing up a few at a time, from all over the confederation, until there are enough human larvae on the _Rukkatar_ that one of them finally tells her it’s unnecessary and frankly a bit odd to refer to them by both their given name and species. She doesn’t speak to Human— to _Steve—_ to her least favorite human of all time for three full cycles, until he sheepishly explains that he thought it was to differentiate him from a Not-Human Steve somewhere in the student body. 

“The humans are up to something,” venerated Professor Poyi ambulates worriedly to xer tablemates. “Look at them!”

“The humans are always up to something,” Kurukk grumbles in low clicks. She’s tired, her mandibles are still flecked with breakfast, and she can _see_ Steve at the center of the conspiring group. “Name one disaster on this ship that hasn’t had a human instigator. _One._ We should have banned them when we had the chance.”

“Yes, I’m sure you would have led the charge,” elevated Professor Urkkut clicks dryly. His own mandibles are already groomed to a mirror sheen, the vain bastard.

“That’s how you get feral humans,” Hahal says from five feet above, weary ultramarine speckled with cadmium annoyance. “ _Stowaways._ And equal-opportunity lawsuits brought against the university in intergalactic court, neither of which are anything to wish on our fair institution. No, better to keep them where we can see them.”

“Bah,” Kurukk says, rattling her carapace in deep-seated annoyance. “Humans are a menace and you can quote me on that.”

“Well, you are not incorrect,” Hahal billows, cadmium blending into bile-green humor.

The humans and their long, obnoxiously large bodies are all wedged into a corner near the tray return, exchanging wriggly signs and vibrating at a near-constant rumble. That might explain why Hahal is haunting this table at the far end of the room, instead of floating around being an equal-opportunity cantankerous quarkhole. The buzz is strong enough to raise an odd ticklish sensation at the tips of Kurukk’s antennae, and she can already feel what she thinks of as a human-hangover settling in.

“Celebration be having,” Steve is happy to explain, once they’re back in the medical bay and she can order him to be _silent_. He made her his thesis advisor, so he really has no one to blame but himself. “Fun, new humans, new student-larvae. You coming!”

He hadn’t added an interrogative handsign to that last bit, she notices. “No. Certainly not coming.”

“Most important doctor coming definitely,” Steve insists. “Students need seeing most important doctor.”

“Perhaps revered doctor Kurukk does not want to see or know any more students,” Kurukk suggests acerbically, which makes Human Steve’s facial dermis wrinkle so badly that she throws up her tarsals. “What is the point? Why?”

“Talking together nice.”

“I’m talking to you right now!”

“No, talking like,” Steve says, lip caught by a mouth bone as he concentrates on the words, “No work, no university talking. Friend talking. Good for humans, good for all student.”

“And I suppose you all intend to get extremely _tired,”_ she says, and Steve holds up a hand. 

“I am not be tired,” he signs, carefully and with some pride. “I am designated survivor.”

 _“Survivor?_ ” she clicks out.

* * *

Kurukk exhausts her supply of activated charcoal fairly early in the night, and goes on to raid the chemistry supply closet and, after some thought, the xenoicthyology labs. 

The next morning her medical bay looks like a trashy vidstream recreation of the last of the expansionist wars, the bodies of students and a disturbing number of tenured faculty scattered over surfaces and each other like so much refuse. But no one has actually died and only one bot has a new weapon attached when first shift starts— Stabby and its new friend Blasty are recharging under her desk, and she’s far too exhausted to chase them out.

“See? Fun time,” Steve says with a feeble show of mouth bone, lying on the floor next to the desk. “Super fun. Fun fun.”

“I deeply regret knowing of your existence, Human Steve,” Kurukk says from below the desk with the bots, all legs folded under her and her abdomen snugged tight to her thorax. Stabby is faintly warm under her head, and has courteously pointed its knife in the other direction.

“Happy party, doctor. Good good party. Excellent.”

“Stop _vibrating_ at me, you evolutionary dead end.”

* * *

Humans make a horrendous amount of noise even when they sleep. Truly a disadvantageous allied species from every possible angle.

## 5.

Apparently, humans can survive the vacuum of space. Two minutes of consciousness, five minutes without any oxygen. Likely swelling of the dermis, but no bursting, and chances of decompression and radiation sickness can be minimized depending on how shielded the body is while adrift. Kurukk finds she is not surprised, only so relieved her segments seem to be sublimating into a Hahal-like cloud.

“You are too stupid to live,” she informs Steve as she runs behind the gurney, wings giving her an extra boost every other step. “Beyond repair. Your entire species is fundamentally broken in the braincase and has no business on a vessel of higher learning.”

Steve is showing her a thin sliver of mouth bones, even with raw red blisters on his lips and his single-facet eyes unfocused and dull. “Loving you too, most important doctor.”

Unfortunately, whoever taught him the Basic sign for love was either trying to sleep with or humiliate him. Kurukk breaks into hysterical clattering laughter and doesn’t stop until they reach the med bay proper. 

“Why laughing so big?” Steve asks, just before she puts him under. “Tell truth.”

“I am emotionally attached to you as well,” Kurukk allows, because he’s technically died several times today and could probably use the boost. “And if you repeat this to anyone else, I will deny it.”

Steve vibrates at her with mouth bones on full display, a rhythmic, soft, almost pleasant noise before he finally slips under. She thinks it might be laughter, too.


End file.
